The present disclosure relates generally to an electrical connecting device and in particular, to a connecting device for use in connecting telecommunications signal lines with a switching device.
Many existing telecommunication switching devices include terminals for directly connecting incoming and outgoing telecommunication signal cabling directly to the switching device. However, new switching devices have been introduced with a modular design in which a variable number of card units are included, with the card units oriented in a vertical direction. An example of a modular designed switching device is the CBX500 ATM switch manufactured by Lucent Technologies. In this switching device, connections to the card units are made via ports arranged in vertical columns, with each column of ports corresponding to a respective card unit. The ports provided in such a switching device are not conveniently arranged for connection with incoming and outgoing signal cables. Although a patch connection panel of conventional design could be interposed between the ports of the switch device and the incoming and outgoing cables, utilizing a conventional patch panel would result in an inconvenient, cluttered, confusing and less economical cabling arrangement.
Another type of electrical connecting device currently available is a patch panel with fifty pin connectors that may be utilized as a telecommunication switching device. However, the patch panel with fifty pin connectors limits the number of DS1 circuits (DS1 stands for “Digital Signal One” and represents a digital signal rate of 1.544 megabytes) to twenty-five for each transmit/receive cable set. In applications where more than twenty-five circuits are required, another fifty pin connector and an additional transmit/receive cable set is required. This may result in requiring a total of four cables to support thirty-two DS1 circuits.